Obama’s 2012 Prospects: Now for the Bad News

A few days ago, in the form of a faux Christmas memo from David Axelrod, I laid out the optimistic argument for President Obama securing a second term. Political strategists are paid to be upbeat. The facts and figures I cited, including the polling data, were accurate, and the basic thesis in support of which they were presented is incontestable: during the past few months, Obama’s prospects have improved substantially.

Of necessity, the evidence I cited was somewhat selective. Today, I will try and redress the balance by focussing on some of the factors I left out or minimized. For comparison purposes, I’ll use the same framework I used in the original post:

1) The Polls: Yes, Obama’s approval rating in the closely watched Gallup tracking poll has rebounded from the lows it plumbed during the summer debt-ceiling crisis. But it hasn’t risen nearly as much as he would have hoped—or would need if he’s to win come November. Even when there is good news for him, such as the killing of Osama bin Laden or the recent capitulation by Congressional Republicans on extending the payroll-tax cut, the political payoff he receives tends to be temporary.

Take the payroll-tax showdown, which came to a head on December 22nd, when the Republicans caved. For the period from December 21st to December 23rd—the Gallup poll is based on a three-day moving average—Obama’s approval rating was forty-seven per cent and his disapproval rating was forty-five per cent. Hallelujah! On Tuesday morning, I drafted a short piece pointing out this development. Just as I was about to post it, a sharp-eyed editor spotted that it had disappeared. Tuesday’s update from Gallup, which was based on sampling carried out between December 23rd and December 26th, showed Obama’s disapproval rating once again topping his disapproval rating: forty-eight per cent to forty-six per cent.

In the past couple of days, the gap has widened against Obama. As of Thursday, his disapproval rating was fifty per cent, and his approval rating had fallen back to just forty-one per cent. This latter finding might be an outlier. The poll has a margin of error of three per cent, and it is a mistake to put much emphasis on any given day’s numbers. As with any tracking poll, the trend is what matters. But even with all of those qualifications, the message for Obama is hardly encouraging. A week after one of the biggest political victories of his Presidency, his approval rating, at least according to Gallup, is still stuck in the low forties.

How bad is this? Since the Second World War, only two Presidents elected to office have been voted out when seeking reëlection: Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. In December of his third year in office, Carter’s approval rating in the Gallup poll was fifty-three per cent; Bush Sr., at the same stage, had an approval rating of fifty-one per cent. Obama is running well below these two losers. If he can’t get his approval rating to stick in the high forties, at a minimum, it is hard to see how he can be competitive come next fall.

2) The economy: Setting aside the weaknesses of the Republican candidates, the recent uptick in the recovery is the best thing Obama has going for him. In comparison to some worrywart economists, I am optimistic it will continue and, quite possibly, accelerate. (If you are wondering why, click here.) But it would probably be folly to bet a large sum on this outcome.

For the past few months, the economy has been expanding at an annual rate of about two per cent. The Federal Reserve and most other professional forecasters see that figure picking up a bit in 2012, to about two and half per cent. In normal times, this would be a respectable growth rate. For an economy still pulling itself out of a deep hole, with an unemployment rate of 8.6 per cent, it is pretty feeble—too feeble to support a sustained drop in the jobless figures.

From Obama’s point of view, the unemployment rate is close to everything. Ever since the start of 2009, when two of his economic advisors, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, said it wouldn’t rise above eight per cent, his opponents have been ramming the jobless numbers down his throat. Unless things change dramatically in the next few months, the Republican candidate will make this his main line of attack, and it might well work.

It worked for Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979, when her campaign was largely based around Charles Saatchi’s famous poster that showed a long line of people outside an unemployment office under the headline: “LABOUR ISN’T WORKING.” It worked again in 1992, for Bill Clinton, who accused George Bush of failing to get the economy going after the recession of 1990-91.

As a factual matter, Clinton was wrong. Revisions to the national income accounts show that the U.S. economy was growing rapidly throughout 1992: in every quarter of the year, the G.D.P. rose at an annual rate of more than four per cent. But that wasn’t how people saw it at the time of the November 1992 election. Unemployment was still stubbornly above seven per cent, and exit polls showed that three quarter of Americans believed the economy was in bad shape.

What really matters in Presidential politics is not raw economic statistics but what the Brits call the “feel good factor.” As of today, there is still little sign of that picking up. In its daily tracking survey, Gallup also asks people to describe the economic conditions in the country. The choices are “excellent,” “good,” “only fair,” and “poor.” In the most recent survey period, which was December 26th-December 28th, fifty per cent of respondents said “poor.” Just eleven per cent said “excellent” or “good.” Somewhat surprisingly, popular feelings about the economy appear to have deteriorated during the last year. For the same three-day period in 2010, the Gallup poll results were: “poor”—thirty nine per cent; “excellent” or “good”—sixteen per cent.

These figures are doubly bad news for Obama. They confirm what many other polls are saying: most Americans think the economy is still in poor shape. Additionally, they suggest that even if the recent pick-up is sustained it will take some time for voters to recognize it: the “feel-good factor” is a lagging indicator. If it lags by too much, Obama could find himself in the same awkward position as Bush Sr.: trying to persuade a skeptical public that things are better than they seem.

3) The Republicans: With Mitt, Newt, Ron et al. busy slugging it out in Iowa, it is easy to dismiss them as a very weak set of candidates. That judgment may well be accurate, but it doesn’t account for some of the Republican Party’s built-in advantages, the main one of which is that America, at least in the judgment of most Americans, remains a center-right country.

Consider yet another survey from Gallup, released on Thursday, which examined the ideological views of about a thousand people, who were roughly equally divided between Democrats, Republicans, and independents. (Actually, there were slightly more independents.) Despite this relatively even partisan split, forty-two per cent of the respondents described themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative.” Thirty-seven per cent described themselves as “moderate,” and just nineteen per cent described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal.”

If you think this sounds promising for the Republicans, I would agree with you, especially since fifty-seven per cent of the respondents described President Obama as “liberal” or “very liberal” and only twenty-three per cent described him as “moderate.” (Another fifteen per cent described him as “conservative” or “very conservative.”) When asked to categorize the Republican candidates in turn, the overwhelming majority of people described them as “conservative” or “moderate.” For Romney for example, the figures were forty-five percent and twenty-nine per cent. (For Gingrich: they were fifty-five per cent and eighteen per cent.)

The headline that Gallup placed on its news release about the survey did a good job encapsulating its message: “Americans See Views of GOP Candidates Closer to Their Own.” Of course, this doesn’t mean Obama’s position is hopeless. Back in 2008, the Gallup analysts pointed out, most Americans regarded him as pretty liberal, but that didn’t stop him getting nearly fifty-three per cent of the vote. However, on that occasion he was facing an aging, ill-defined opponent, and he was armed with the strongest campaign slogan that any candidate can have: it’s time for a change.

This year, a Republican candidate will be repeating that message ad infinitum. As of now, it’s looking like it will be Romney. To be sure, he has some potential weaknesses, and the well-financed Obama campaign will seek to exploit them in the coming months. But as a candidate who is avowedly of the center-right, he starts out from an advantageous position. And for what it’s worth, he is now ahead of the President in the polls—or one of them, anyway. In a Rasmussen survey that was also released on Thursday, Romney was leading Obama in a head-to-head matchup by forty-five per cent to thirty-nine per cent. That’s not a huge lead—it’s not much outside the poll’s margin of error—but for Obama it’s a worrying one.